Last we heard of Velocity Micro it was coughing up licensing fees to Microsoft for its Android range, so it makes sense that the company should have a few new products to make the most of that spend. The Velocity Micro Cruz T408 and Cruz T410 fall decidedly on the budget end of the spectrum, priced at $239.99 and $299.99 respectively when they drop at the end of the month, with the T408 having an 8-inch 800 x 600 4:3 capacitive touchscreen, and the T410 having a 10-inch 1024 x 600 16:9 capacitive touchscreen. Unfortunately, there are some compromises to be made along the way.

Biggest is the OS: both these Android slates run 2.3 Gingerbread, not Honeycomb (though judging by the screenshots, VM has dressed them up with some Honeycomb-style UI customizations), which means they're not eligible for the Android Market. Instead, Velocity Micro preloads the Amazon Appstore for Android on there, along with the Kindle app, Angry Birds Rio and QuickOffice. These run on a single-core 1GHz Cortex A8 processor, paired with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of onboard storage.

There's also WiFi b/g/n, a front-facing camera, microSD card slot and Flash Player 10.3 support. "Making expensive, jaw dropping products is easy," Velocity Micro CEO Randy Copeland argues, "speed and value are what we focused on with these new devices." Whether that will be enough to not only persuade shoppers to buy the T408 or T410, but also not return them a week later, remains to be seen.